Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.
All across Rwanda since the national genocide memorial day in early April, individual sectors have been holding their own commemorations, each one on the day the killings started in that particular sector. The commemorations are spread over one hundred days, which is all the time it took to kill an estimated 800,000 people.
The genocide memorial centre for my sector, Ndora, is in a place called Kabuye, about three kilometres from where I live. It is a really beautiful spot, perched on top of a hill with a number of other higher hills around it on all sides. On the 1st June 1994 thousands of refugees, almost all of them Tutsis, were frantically trying to find a place of safety from the Interahamwe. They were told that this hill was a safe place and almost forty thousand men, women and children gathered there over the next two days.
In fact the hill had been chosen because it was a perfect killing ground. Surrounded by higher hills and with a good network of roads leading to it from all directions, it was a location the killers could access and encircle without too much difficulty.
On the 3rd of June, having decided that as many of the refugees had gathered as were likely to be around, the attacks started. Military units stationed on the hills surrounding used mortars and machine guns to fire into the enormous crowd gathered on Kabuye. Then, from all directions, bands of men armed with machetes encircled the hill and began moving slowly up, checking the bodies and finishing off anyone who was either injured or had escaped the mortars and machine-gun bullets. Many of those who had survived were children whose parents had covered them with their own bodies when the firing began – some of those who had the presence of mind to lie still were overlooked, covered as they were with the blood of their fathers or mothers. Most were not so lucky.
Killing is tiring work – as the day wore on, the interahamwe began to get clumsy and careless. Some of those they tried to kill with machete blows to the head were only stunned and wounded but not killed. Eventually, thinking they had killed everyone there, they went back home.
The mass grave in Kabuye today has 50,027 bodies in it, some gathered from the surrounding countryside but most of them the bodies of those killed on Kabuye hill on June 3rd 1994. Every year, any bodies that have been discovered in the sector since the last ceremony are brought along and buried as part of the commemoration.
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On Wednesday morning I dressed up in my best suit and tie, not quite sure what was the appropriate dress code, and headed for work a little later than usual. I had no idea where the genocide memorial was or what exactly the format of the day was going to be but I figured people would gather at the office first, and I was right. There were about twelve or fourteen people there, all dressed up in their finest (glad I had made the right decision) and most of them sporting something purple, the colour of mourning – ribbons, scarves, sashes, hairbands, whatever. We headed off towards Kabuye around eight o’clock and I got a lift on Vincent’s moto (I’m back on the stick since my knee started acting up again so they didn’t want me to walk and I didn’t want to tell them that walking was fine, it was having to bend my knee on the back of a moto that was the problem!). It was only a few minutes there and most of the rest of the staff were already there setting up the awnings, laying out chairs and benches and designing big ribbony-thingies in purple and white to decorate everything. Bellancille designed me a nice thin purple ribbon in a spiral design for my lapel!
Our main problem was that the hill is quite steep, so the plastic garden chairs we were lining up had a tendency to tip over backwards even without anyone sitting in them. These were the seats for the dignitaries, including government ministers, judges, senators, members of parliament and goodness knows who else. We were off to one side and therefore our seats being along the side of the slope were actually a lot safer and more comfortable, but the last thing we wanted was for the Minister of Culture to fall flat on the back of his head on an occasion like this! (Alfred: Well, on any occasion, I would hope). We also got the altar set up and a few benches were placed perpendicular to the altar.
When the lorry with the coffins arrived, I realised what the benches were for. There were two coffins, each accompanied by a host of friends and family members and they carried the coffins over to the benches and laid them down in front of the altar. Each of them was wrapped in a large purple and white shroud with bouquets of flowers just like we would have at a funeral back home in Ireland.
By now the crowd was beginning to assemble, posh people in the seats, everyone else just milling around trying to find a spot wherever they could. Five of my colleagues were acting as protocol hostesses, guiding people to seats and evicting people of lesser rank if needs be to accommodate someone more important who had arrived late. Glad I didn’t have their job as there was a huge crowd, very few seats and the more important someone was (or thought they were), the later they tended to arrive, as far as I could see.
The two celebrants arrived and I realised it was to be a Catholic Mass and not some kind of ecumenical affair. The priest I know from the local church was carrying something I had only ever seen in World War Two films before, a big stainless steel chaplain’s box with VALISE CHAPELLE stamped on it. Out of this he took his robes, a golden chalice, two plastic sandwich boxes full of hosts and a bottle of what looked like cooking oil but which turned out to hold the altar wine.
Mass started at 1000, about an hour late (not bad for Rwanda) and I immediately noticed something strange, at least strange to me. Only the Catholics took any part in the ceremony at all – at least I presume that those people who sat and read their books or played with their mobile phones for the hour or so the mass took were doing so because they weren’t Catholics. I suspect I committed a bit of a faux pas when it came to the sign of peace. First I hugged Antoine, my friend, who was sitting beside me (that’s a Rwandan hug, touch each side of the head to the other person’s head and then touch foreheads – gently!) and then I turned and shook hands with the pastor who was sitting on my right. He seemed greatly surprised when I held out my hand but shook it anyway with a little smile while everyone else sitting around grinned and nudged each other (Alfred:yep, got that one right, definitely were not supposed to do that – it’s the nudging each other that gives it away).
The other slightly unusual bit was the raising of the host and chalice. I was expecting either someone somewhere to ring a bell or else for there to be complete silence but what happens here is that people clap, slowly, for as long as the host or chalice are held in the air. (Alfred: he had actually seen this before when he went to mass for St Philippe Neri Day but had obviously forgotten about it).
About halfway through the mass another lorry arrived with another coffin, so the first two were pushed together to make space for the third. I noticed that this one had a name, Ntitizabiba I think, painted on the cross. But the other two didn’t, so who were the people accompanying those coffins? Local people from where the bodies were found? People who had lost relatives and hoped or feared that these were their remains? Or just people who didn’t want the dead to be left unaccompanied on their last journey?
After the mass we were supposed to have speeches and then finish with the burial ceremony but for some reason they decided to do the burial immediately. The head priest (Alfred: he’s called a .... bishop, I think) sprayed holy water over the coffins with a little bundle of twigs and then big groups of men and women came to carry the coffins up the hill to be interred. And then I heard a most extraordinary sound – it reminded me of being on holidays in the Aran Islands as a young boy with my grandparents. There was a big rusty gate that led into a nearby field and, when you opened it quickly, it let out this appalling shriek as if the metal was actually being torn apart. I was looking all around for the source of the noise when I heard it again and saw a number of Red Cross workers walking towards a corner of the crowd. It was a young woman, probably in her early twenties – she was lying flat on the ground with her arms and legs jerking and spasming wildly in all directions and letting out these incredible, inhuman screams. They got louder and louder and seemed to be coming so close together I couldn’t see how she had time to draw breath. The Red Cross workers picked her up and held her over their heads to take her away so that the flailing arms and legs wouldn’t hit them.
I won’t say that people didn’t pay any attention – many looked upset and a few started to cry gently – but it was obviously something people were used to seeing and everything carried on as normal while she was being taken away. This happened again four times during the afternoon, each time the same pattern and each time the same inhuman screams filling the air. Antoine explained to me that many of the people attending were actually survivors of the massacre and he pointed out to me various people with deep wounds in their heads from where the machete blows had failed to kill them.
Later, amidst the speeches, two survivors spoke about what had happened. They spoke calmly and clearly (albeit in Kinyarwandan so I had no idea what they were saying but this wasn’t really something I could ask Antoine to translate for me) and people listened equally calmly and attentively without any great show of emotion. However, someone then read a poem they had composed for the occasion and that is when the floodgates opened for many people. Interestingly, when Antoine had been translating the programme of events for me earlier, he had predicted that this would happen. He said poetry for Rwandans has a very special significance and he knew this would be the point at which many people would break down.
And so they did. All around me people were crying, mostly quietly, with streams of tears running down their faces and dripping onto their laps. Some were sobbing, a few cried out and shouted for a little while and then subsided into their chairs. And, eventually, they all stopped and dried their faces and went back to ... normal, I suppose.
The final speech was by the Minister of Culture and, while I didn’t understand a word of it, it was a fantastic speech. He started off solemnly as all of them did, but as he went on, his tone lightened. As he came near the end he managed to get the crowd laughing a few times, so when we finished, the mood had brightened appreciably and people left ... well, maybe not happy but certainly in a better frame of mind than they had been a little while earlier.
Antoine and I waited for the dignitaries to disperse and then we started making our way out. As we went past the mass grave (a huge concrete structure with big iron doors leading down into a vast underground chamber) the friends and families af those being interred were going down into the grave to bid a last farewell. Antoine asked if I wanted to go down and see and beckoned me towards the doorway. I said I really didn’t think it would be appropriate but then some of the relatives or friends or whoever they were of the dead also waved at me and asked me to join them.
I really had no idea what to expect and, in fact, it wasn’t anything like what I might have expected. It was just a room with coffins in it – each one draped in purple and white and covered in flowers. The end wall was covered with a big purple and white hanging sheet and behind that were the other 50,000 people that had already been interred here. Having already walked the length of the garve, I had a pretty good idea of the size of the room. Fifty thousand bodies? I’ve been in Lansdowne Road when it has been full, that’s fifty thousand people. I tried to imagine that many people dead, that many people all crammed into this small space, about the size of two or three classrooms. And then I thought of what the hill I had been sitting on must have been like after the massacre, layers upon layers of dead and dying people stacked like firewood, though not as neatly.
I’m not a particularly emotional person, as my friends and family know. But, standing in that room, I could feel those 50,000 people next to me, I could hear them, I almost felt I could reach out and touch them. And I have been in Rwanda long enough and made enough friends here to know what they were like – in my mind I see the women with their fabulously braided hair and shockingly-coloured print dresses, the men with their eclectic t-shirt slogans and plastic sandals or long pointed shoes, the children with their shaved heads dressed in their khaki or blue school uniforms because that is often the only clothes they have – I could see Francois and Antoine and Gaudence and Bellancille and Alexis and Sylvestre and Alexandre and Irène ..... And I could see everyone I know back in Ireland, my students, my family, my friends, my neighbours ...
I have been here for nine months now, to the day and, at the risk of using a rather fanciful image it is as if the idea of the genocide, the reality of it has suddenly been born inside my head. For years I gave classes about it, read books, watched films and documentaries and even while here in Rwanda discussed it dispassionately with survivors and those who were abroad while their families were murdered. But today I looked around me at the people I work with who have become my friends, at the children who wave to me on the way to work, at the old women who shriek with laughter every time one of them has the courage to say ‘Hello’ to me, at the teenagers who get such a kick out of bumping knuckles with me (which is probably something people of my age are NOT supposed to do, judging by the hilarity it causes) – and I imagined them all dead, hacked to pieces and left to die on a beautiful Rwandan hillside in the sun. And not just them but 800,000 of them, ordinary men, women and children.
And then everyone went home. As I passed people on the road they were laughing and joking, back into their normal lives. I thought it strange at first but then realised that everyone in Rwanda lives with this every day of their lives: you have to choose a time to lay down the burden of everyday life so as to lament and let out the agony, and then you pick the burden right up again and continue on.
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